Warner & Swasey complex in Cleveland's Midtown hits the market again

Warner & Swasey 2014

The city of Cleveland is once again seeking suitors to redevelop the vacant Warner & Swasey complex, just east of the intersection of East 55th Street and Carnegie Ave. The long-vacant property sits on 3.1 acres in the Midtown neighborhood.
(Chuck Crow/Plain Dealer file)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The city of Cleveland is taking yet another run at finding a developer for the vacant Warner & Swasey complex in Midtown, four years after the last potential deal fizzled.

On Wednesday, the city issued a request for proposals from potential suitors for the 221,727-square-foot cluster of buildings, located at 5701 Carnegie Ave. The deadline for submissions is March 23.

The Warner & Swasey Co., which built telescopes and machine lathes, occupied the site for more than a century. The company constructed a five-story, reddish-brown building just east of East 55th Street between 1904 and 1910. The city purchased the property in 1991 and demolished the westernmost part of the complex.

Most of the buildings have been empty for almost three decades.

In 2010, Cleveland-based Hemingway Development stepped forward with a plan to transform the buildings into offices and labs, along with warehousing and possible manufacturing space. At the time, the city was willing to sell the complex for only $1, in exchange for making something happen on the prominent, 3.1-acre site.

Cars swish past the vacant Warner & Swasey complex on Carnegie Avenue in Midtown in 2014. The city has repeatedly solicited bids for the property over the last decade, with little to show for its efforts. Another request for proposals went live Wednesday.Chuck Crow/Plain Dealer file

But Hemingway never closed the deal. The developers ultimately argued that the property would be more valuable as a cleared site, not a restoration project. The city disagreed and unsuccessfully sought another round of proposals in 2014.

Since then, the buildings have languished. And the city reallocated $13 million of federal money earmarked for the Warner & Swasey makeover to another project in Midtown, the emerging Link59 business park between Euclid and Chester avenues on either side of East 59th Street.

In a new, 14-page request for proposals, the city expresses a preference for plans that would reuse some or all of the historic structures on the site - though officials in the economic-development department aren't ruling out demolition. Pitches that include high-density development, with a higher concentration of residents or jobs, will get more points than smaller-scale submissions.

The site sits in a mixed-use zoning district where the city and MidTown Cleveland, Inc., a neighborhood nonprofit, are trying to encourage a blend of retail, housing, offices and light industrial development that's easy for people to navigate on foot or by public transportation.

"There are a couple of things that are different from the prior efforts," said Jeff Epstein, executive director of MidTown Cleveland, Inc.

He pointed to growing - and increasingly diverse - investment in Midtown, where apartments, townhouses, hospitality and retail projects are joining technology and healthcare businesses and corporate headquarters. "You have this establishment, now, of this area of Midtown as an office market. We've got office occupancy of over 90 percent in Midtown," he said. "I think the market is in a different place now than it was three, four years ago."

Weeds sprout out of the ground at the vacant Warner & Swasey complex four years ago. Most of the complex has been vacant for almost three decades.Chuck Crow/Plain Dealer file

Epstein pointed to two notable differences between the city's current solicitation and past outreach to bidders.

First, the city wasn't open in the past to razing the complex. This time, that's an option.

Second, the city said it will consider proposals that incorporate a city-owned garage and parking lots west and northwest of Warner & Swasey, if the city's vehicle operations can be relocated without any negative impact. The garage and parking parcels would more than double the size of the development site, to roughly 7.5 acres.

"I think a lot of developers are going to take a look at it," Epstein said.

The city said the sale price for the Warner & Swasey property will be based on an appraisal, though developers might be able to drive down what they pay based on environmental challenges or other factors.

The request for proposals also mentions a range of potential public assistance for the project, including low-interest city and state loans; a partially forgivable loan through a city program aimed at reviving vacant commercial properties; federal and state tax credits tied to historic rehabilitation and investment in low-income areas; and tax-increment financing, in which some of the new property-tax revenues generated by a project are redirected to paying off project debt.